It is becoming increasingly popular to use wireless telecommunications devices such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and two-way pagers to access the Internet. Numerous Internet-based services and applications are already available for such mobile devices, among which are a class of services and applications referred to generally as location-based services. Location-based services allow people to use their mobile devices to search for places or things remotely over the Internet, find the fastest route from one place to another, or obtain other useful location-based information. Some mobile devices include their own internal positioning systems to determine their locations, which can be provided to a remote service over the air for use in providing location-based services.
For location-based services, the data used to perform a geographic search or the data released from the mobile device usually includes a point or a geometric area based on the current location of the mobile device. Such data may be relevant when one wants to find a place near one's current location, but often a user may need location-based services relative to some location other than his current location. For example, a person may wish to obtain location information (e.g., an address or directions) for a restaurant at which he had lunch the day before. The place may be located outside the person's current vicinity, or he may not have location-based services accessible from his current location, or there may be no telecommunications coverage at his current location.